You forgot the most important part. The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged.
Taking our a vast loan to study English literature might seem unwise, but it’s something I could definitely see a starry eyed 17 year old deciding to do.
The bulk of education debt in the U.S. is not about undergrad degrees in English literature or the like. By and large, it gets incurred either for lucrative postgrad degrees (MBA, law, medical etc.) or for earning degrees at "non-traditional" for-profit colleges.
To this day, almost two decades after I left my philosophy PhD program (without a PhD), I still have massive student loan debt.
Even if I had completed my degree, though, philosophy PhDs aren't particularly lucrative. Tenured professors at major universities do ok, but the road to getting tenure-track jobs and then tenure is littered with the bodies of grad students.
I don't think starry-eyed 21 year olds deciding what to do are much different from starry-eyed 17 year olds deciding what to do.
It's worth noting, by the way, that the United States has a shortage of medical doctors.
What the U.S. actually has is a group of people intent on keeping their doctor wages high by limiting supply through regulation and bottleneck creation.
As a med school dropout (best decision of my life), were I to "go back" to early college: I would have instead pursued a BSN (which my college offered!), to set myself up into eventually becoming a nurse practitioner. That way, if I decided to not complete graduate school, I'd still have an applicable role/job within medicine. Were I to have graduated that program, I also would have been able to practice much earlier (albeit limited scope, per US State).
Instead, what does an uncredentialled Chemistry Bachelor do after dropping out of medical school? ...I became an electrician, which allowed me to help people without sacrificing my lifestyle.
If your goal also includes "make substantial sums of money," I always recommend to preMeds they consider all the different ways someone can make money helping people without having to sacrifice your entire early adulthood.
The majority of my medschool classmates refer to me as "the dumbest smart guy they know," but in confidence several have expressed jealousy at not having to work so much (for IMHO so little, as physicians). Just cogs in an overly-complex, wealth-extracting machine...
Nurse practitioners are the overused. If you are on medicaid, at least in my state, you are almost guranteed to be seen by a nurse practitioner rather than an actual pyschiatrist. Even if you aren't on medicaid, which medicaid is usually better than any other marketplace insurance for selection of providers and service, getting seen by a nurse practitioner is very common.
Additionally, while many may be knowledgable about the medications they prescribe, I have had nurse practitioners prescribe me medication they didn't even know existed, as in during my session I asked for a specific medication based on a personal recomendation from a freind in the field, they didn't know what the medication was and looked up on google and then prescribed it to me.
There are good nurse practitioners, but they simply should not be prescribing long term pyschiatric medication with the level of schooling they have.
It takes 2 years to become a nurse, and 3 years to become a nurse practitioner. Additional certification is required to prescribe certain medications, but even then the amount of training and classes a nurse practitioner will take to understamd medications is very small compared to a psychiatrist.
It's absurd. NP's have been the solution to psychiatist shortage and it seems no one cares. Most likely, because anyone who knows is zombified by SSRIs by shit NPs or is in the medical field so their vision is already clouded by bias. Nurse takeover is a joke. Anybody with 2-3 years of schooling should be relagated to changing bedpans and putting in IVs. Not functioning as psuedo doctors.
>they didn't know what the medication was and looked up on google and then prescribed it to me.
How human that this practitioner admitted to not knowing something; then took the time to look up the drug's factsheet; and then trusted you enough to take your friend's personal recommendation.
>There are good nurse practitioners
Agreed. And terrible physicians, as well as good.
>...but they simply should not be prescribing long term pyschiatric medication with the level of schooling they have.
Agreed – with the additional thought that even physicians overprescribe these mind-altering substances in far-too-abundance.
>NP's have been the solution to psychiatist shortage and it seems no one cares...Nurse takeover is a joke.
I think most people "on psych meds" really just need better friends / families / societies / healthcare . It is most unfortunate that we are our own worst enemies, sometimes; particularly in allowing US healthcare expenditures to be highest with no obvious benefit (to patients).
It all made me so sick decades ago that I quit before even starting.
You are right in the context of the power NP's have compared to regular doctors. The primary difference in an NP and a doctor practically is pay. They do so much similar stuff, even though they shouldn' be allowed to. NP's prescribing meds, like a child with bazooka shooting at mentally ill people.
Out of curiosity, why cannot hospitals fund residency slots on their own with some riders (the resident should work in the same hospital for x years)?
It seems odd that the medical profession is not willing to invest in the training of the next generation of professionals without government help.
They do sometimes. People don’t realize how much of medicine, generally, is funded through the government. Additionally, society gives medicine a lot of leeway to act selfishly because the core practice of healing is so altruistic.
Broadly, it’s the same issue that all jobs have: it’s cheaper to hire pre-trained professionals than to hire and train.
Because they need to support their executives and capital projects / debt service. That’s the discretionary budget… training doctors doesn’t improve the bottom line.
Hospitals are really quasi-government entities. Their pricing structures have price controls based on Medicare reimbursements. A third of hospital revenue is Medicare and Medicaid.
Both programs have been slowing rate growth, which in turn impacts private insurance as well. The institutions haven’t been successful in reducing cost growth. ACA built out regional cartels^H provider networks, essentially eliminating competition.
I was trying to keep my comment short. Such a regulatory regime would be expected to close such obvious loopholes.
In much the same way that a doctor in $FOREIGN_COUNTRY cannot practice telemedicine in the USA, I would expect the regulations to make a distinction between software (and services provided by software) developed by foreign and licensed programmers.
>much the same way that a doctor in $FOREIGN_COUNTRY cannot practice telemedicine in the USA...
U.S. retired doctor here. This is a fascinating possibility that never occurred to me until I read your comment. Could a foreign doctor not set up a system whereby she/he could appear to be in the U.S. while being in a country that's essentially unreachable by U.S. authorities? And take payment in cryptocurrency?
> Lobby the government to prohibit anyone from practicing programming without a license.
No way you're getting consensus on this one, but even if you could, it's too hard to stop. If you charge for compilers, and only provide them to licensed developers, hippies will make and distribute compilers for free.
Also, the vast majority of software bugs are annoying at worst, with no death potential. Powers that be would react a lot more aggressively if stack overflows routinely led to bodies on the pavement.
Considering the number of ransomware attacks and other viruses that infect hospitals, it wouldn't surprise me if stack overflows had quite a large body count.
Why not both? Even better if you have to obtain accreditation as a professional in every different market because EU software is different from US software is different from Indian software...
Let's do note that on that graph which mapped a variety of increased costs, the only thing that increased faster than college costs was the cost of medical. That's connected to the shortage of doctors. Regulatory capture isn't just an issue with higher ed.
This is really a weird requirement and most other places in the world don't have it, without suffering any setbacks when it comes to outcomes of treatments.
Imagine that every programmer would have to study, say, Latin for 4 years before being allowed to code.
Agreed. It might make some sense to require undergrad chemistry and biology for med school applicants but presumably that could be squeezed into 2 years of undergrad. Possibly a customized curriculum could teach it faster or as part of med school.
Well, the OP did say “the bulk of” — some people, like you, are surely carrying debt for non-lucrative degrees.
But the pipeline of lawyers, doctors, MBAs, etc. is quite a bit larger than self-pay philosophy PhDs, and a large fraction of those professional degrees are full-freight, $70k/year (plus living expenses!) of pure debt.
Not all lawyers and doctors are the same. Consider public defenders. And physician compensation can vary dramatically depending on whether they're a general practitioner or specialist, rural or urban, etc.
Ironically, the ones we need the most are paid the least.
Of course, that's assuming students finish their degrees and get jobs. Plenty of people drop out of school, and they don't get refunds! Law students fail to pass the bar, etc.
Yes, and indeed, this is exactly the argument used by the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, in which public defenders / nonprofit lawyers / rural nonprofit doctors’ loans are written forgiven after 10 years of public service so they are not saddled with a lifetime of debt they can’t pay off due to choosing careers in public service. You’re in a supposedly “lucrative” career with a high debt load, but choosing not to pursue the typical high-income pathway.
That program has many gotchas, but at least this reflects a recognition that debt creates incentives that society may not want.
For Law, it's not just about not passing the bar. It's about getting into a top 10 law school and getting a top clerkship. And then getting into a top firm. Yeah, some people don't end up on that train and do OK but it's probably not a great ROI even if they pass the checkmarks.
It’s an implication of a system that pays commensurate to what one contributes to the economy rather than commensurate to what one contributes to society.
> I left my philosophy PhD program (without a PhD), I still have massive student loan debt
In humanities fields, if the department thinks you belong in the program, they pay you to attend. They'll give you fellowships, TAships, and RAships. If they don't give you those, they're telling you not to attend. This is a harsh truth.
>That's not generally true. I attended a state university, and the department simply didn't have the funding to pay for its graduate students.
I mean, maybe? I know a number of state schools, certainly not all of them, but plenty that can afford paid spots for PhD students in the humanities that are certainly enough for someone to support themselves on. It doesn't pay as well, nearly as well, as jobs that humanities student with a good GPA from a good university can get in the private sector, but its not bad at all.
They're not denying your experience. They are, however, pointing out you didn't do your research Well when picking programs to apply to.
I've been in different universities and the experiences for the same departments very considerably. You specify on your application whether you want your admission to be conditional on funding. One communications department for example would typically admit only 2 to 3 students per year on funding. I thought it was very competitive to get into. But of course if you tell them you're willing to pay your own way admission becomes much easier.
Other departments may not be that upfront with the deal but all people applying to grad school should understand these Dynamics.
> They are, however, pointing out you didn't do your research Well when picking programs to apply to.
That's presuming a whole hell of a lot, and it's insulting. You know absolutely nothing about me or my history except what I've already said, which is not much.
I'm not here to be second-guessed by anonymous rando strangers.
We're wondering if you were perhaps mislead somewhat, because in our experience its quite rare for a department not to have any funded PhDs with stipends.
> We're wondering if you were perhaps mislead somewhat
I wasn't. But I'm not going to write an autobiography here. I already regret revealing personal details in this thread.
> in our experience its quite rare for a department not to have any funded PhDs with stipends.
Who is "our" and what is your "experience"? Are you referring to Telemakhos and yourself? Are either of you even former humanities PhD students? And how many departments have you surveyed such that you can make a judgment of rarity?
I'll be very honest with you, I've never met a humanities PhD student without funding who should've been pursuing a PhD, and if the department you were in was so poorly funded that it couldn't give out stipends, then it's likely that you would've never found a job in academia afterwards anyway.
Look, its not your fault, some people don't end up in the right undergraduate programs, they don't meet the right people, make the right connections, and get into good PhD programs with funding. In any other case, if you don't have a lot of money and time to waste, its almost always a bad idea.
> I've never met a humanities PhD student without funding who should've been pursuing a PhD
1) In your entire life, how many humanities PhD students without funding have you met? Perhaps you think that, somehow, you've magically met most of them, since you seem to believe there aren't that many.
2) It's just your opinion whether an individual "should've been pursuing a PhD".
> if the department you were in was so poorly funded that it couldn't give out stipends, then it's likely that you would've never found a job in academia afterwards anyway.
My former department has placed many tenure-track positions.
I think what may be going unsaid is there are some predatory practices that puff up the idea of a PhD to get people to attend a department that is otherwise struggling. It sounds like what you describe is rarer in better programs. That shouldn’t be taken as personal or an immutable law, just a general observation.
> I think what may be going unsaid is there are some predatory practices that puff up the idea of a PhD to get people to attend a department that is otherwise struggling.
No, it was already said:
>>> We're wondering if you were perhaps mislead somewhat
To reiterate, I was making a general point. You making it personal does not negate that point. If you re-read what I wrote, I was not implying you were mislead, but also that it isn’t rare in lesser programs. Not everything has to be true about you and your personal experience to be valid.
So your point is that well-renowned graduate programs are on an equal financial footing as those that are less well regarded?
I think it’s fairly well established that better programs have better funding. This generally results in more funding for PhD prospects. It’s great that you want to share your anecdotal experience, but don’t pretend that it means it’s a incontrovertible generalizable truth.
>Nobody here has any evidence
When someone relies on absolute language like “nobody” or “everyone”, it’s a clue they are making an emotional rather than a reasoned argument. In this case, there is data about funding and PhD opportunities.
> So your point is that well-renowned graduate programs are on an equal financial footing as those that are less well regarded?
No. I don't know where in the world you got that from what I said.
> I think it’s fairly well established that better programs have better funding.
It's not that simple. Funding can vary widely by university and department. You want to make it uniform, but it's not.
The reputation of a program is determined by a number of factors, and it can change over time. A lot depends on the particular professors who happen to be there at a certain point. And sometimes giant public universities are able to compete with smaller elite private universities by sheer size, i.e., the size of the faculty.
>No. I don't know where in the world you got that from what I said.
I’m trying to be generous by helping to clarify what you mean otherwise it comes across as someone arguing for the sake of arguing.
>You want to make it uniform
Not at all, and that was never said or implied. My point is the opposite; that programs differ in funding. I just take it a step further to make the point that lower funding leads to less funded PhD opportunities. Take early during COVID; funding temporarily dropped when many foreign students could no longer attend meaning it was easier for a self funded student get into a top program (I know because that’s what I did.) That same funding dynamic plays out with lower ranked schools because they tend to get much less research dollars.
>the reputation of a program is determined by a number of factors
Again, I don’t think anyone is disputing this. The point is about how reputation is related to funding and funding is related to PhD opportunities.
> otherwise it comes across as someone arguing for the sake of arguing
It's funny how you don't think this applies to you, especially since you came in almost a day after the HN discussion started and long after everyone else stopped replying. In this way, you prolonged an argument that had already come to an end.
> That same funding dynamic plays out with lower ranked schools because they tend to get much less research dollars.
Well, the humanities tend not to get a lot of research dollars, period.
> The point is about how reputation is related to funding
And my point is that they're not as closely related as you seem to believe.
>Well, the humanities tend not to get a lot of research dollars, period.
And it’s no coincidence that the humanities have the highest rate of self-funded PhDs.
>my point is that they’re not as closely related as you seem to believe
You may need to explain why govt research grants and endowments tend to follow the higher ranked institutions. And if you look at some of the ranking structure, they are explicitly tied to financial aid which is tied to endowments. I’m not saying it’s perfect or ideal, but ranking, money, and graduate positions are all intertwined.
> You may need to explain why govt research grants and endowments tend to follow the higher ranked institutions.
Institutions. Not departments. Within the same institution, some departments may be very well funded, and some departments may be poorly funded. This is basic stuff that you should already know, and if you don't, then you certainly shouldn't be lecturing me.
My patience is worn out here. This back and forth is not interesting. I don't wish to continue with you any longer.
I see you only cherry picked a part of that statement. Surely you understand that research grants are awarded to professors and departments? As are many donations are earmarked for specific programs and departments. Those research dollars are what directly fund grad student positions. And the rankings are relatively stable, although there can be jockeying in some specific tiers. Schools like John’s Hopkins, UCLA and Michigan will be near the top of health care research dollars as well as top rankings in practically any year. Your posts read as someone who is trying to rationalize personal decisions rather than someone who knows how the system works.
> Are either of you even former humanities PhD students?
I have my PhD in Greek and Latin. I applied to many schools for my PhD program and, on the advice of professors who had told me what I repeated above, accepted admission to the department that gave me the best aid offer, not necessarily the one with the best reputation. They were right, and I never paid a dime for my education.
> accepted admission to the department that gave me the best aid offer, not necessarily the one with the best reputation.
That's a personal choice, but it's an obvious tradeoff with downsides. If you have a non-monetary goal — after all, pursuing a PhD in the humanities would be a crazy way to make money — then why would you let money stand in your way?
> They were right, and I never paid a dime for my education.
They were right in what sense? You could also never pay a dime for your education by never pursuing a PhD. Regardless, you spent valuable years of your life on it. That's a big investment, and time is more precious than money.
I am glad that you admitted, though, that some more prestigious schools may have less financial aid. There appeared to be a kind of denial of this reality before.
> Tenured professors at major universities do ok, but the road to getting tenure-track jobs and then tenure is littered with the bodies of grad students.
I'm reminded of that quote from Interstellar: "I never really fully considered the possibility that I wasn't the one."
Almost 60% of U.S. undergraduate students take out either federal or private loans and there are 5x as many undergraduate students as graduate students in the U.S.
For those downvoting:
54% of US graduate students take out student loans, while around 55% of US undergraduate students take out loans. The average undergraduate student loan debt is around $29000, while the average debt for graduate school borrowers is $71000. Given that there are five times as many undergraduate students as graduate students and given that a greater number of undergraduate students take out loans, the average graduate school debt would have to be nearly $150k to be greater than the undergraduate debt.
Of course it was based on the number of dollars, but based on which figures? It was an assertion conjured out of thin air. If there are five times as many undergrad students as grad students and a similar percentage of grad students had to take out student loans, then this would mean that students are incurring on average five times more debt for graduate school. This is without taking into consideration that a far higher percentage of US graduate students are international students.
It looks like graduate debt was approaching the majority and could in fact be a majority in 2024: "If these trends continue, graduate loan disbursements may exceed undergraduate disbursements in the next few years." https://sites.ed.gov/ous/files/2023/08/OCE_GraduateDebtRepor...
You're conflating current disbursements with the outstanding debt, which is what the original assertion was on. Either way it is looked at though, their assertion is wrong.
> You're conflating current disbursements with the outstanding debt
No, I was just googling for stats, and that's what I was able to find. Here's something else though: "46% of federal student loan debt belonged to graduate student borrowers in 2017." https://educationdata.org/average-graduate-student-loan-debt
My Harvardlaw Lawyerbro literally ended a family dinner argument by telling Littlelawyerbro "which law school did you attend? UT? So then not Harvard?"
In this particular conversation Harvardbro was obviously and factually incorrect, but his pompous rhetoric usually gets everybody else to silence themselves (not in awe).
Interestingly, Harvardbro only got accepted into the two schooltypes you mentioned (and no 2nd tiers).
> I could definitely see a starry eyed 17 year old deciding to do.
That's the addendum to the "most important part." These people without an education in complex debt instruments are the vast majority of the time either children, or were children quite recently. Even when it comes to the ones in grad school, I have jeans older than their legal ability to sign contracts.
Plenty of smart people who get liberal arts degrees from top schools do just fine. I know plenty of them even though I have engineering degrees myself. They may not get FAANG salaries in general--unless they end up in management--but plenty of people I know are just fine.
>Plenty of smart people who get liberal arts degrees from top schools do just fine.
There's research that also shows smart people who get degrees from "non" top schools do just fine as well. They studies those who got accepted to top schools but went to "lesser" ones. Implying top schools select people who will be successful regardless, rather than helping make people successful. It's important to not confuse the causal relationship.
* It's also worth noting the authors of those studies found a caveat with people on the lowest ends of the socioeconomic strata getting more benefit from the top schools.
I see a problem here. Why are English majors in Management positions? With LLMs, I don't see a value on an English degree anymore. So I personally believe it's just a money sink at this point. I don't believe art can be taught in universities as a degree program. Universities should only be for domains that have tangible value.
LLMs are the exact antithesis of what an English degree teaches you: how to communicate effectively and with context, and to understand nuance in what other people say. LLMs make things that sound good but have no real depth to them.
My university english was class was more about writing an essay on what the different colors in the Great Gatsby meant. Evidently this was true across many colleges since it was trivially easy to go on sparknotes, get the answer to that exact prompt, and get an easy A.
My university computer science classes included professors who thought that "vim was what the kids used now" and that the best way to teach operating systems was to give a lecture on how compiler authors break your code with optimizations. Maybe this is an indictment of their teaching and not the entire field?
You might understand this but I would like to believe and employer won't.
Anyways, my main point is universities should focus more on tangible skills - accounting, engineering etc and should not have random useless degrees of little value. Maybe English major is still valuable, but I personally don't see the tangible value in it - other than being an English teacher.
You don't think about things from the perspective of someone who actually owns or starts a business, you think about things as someone who is an employee and wants to promote skills that help others get employed: accountant, engineer. Something great about engineers and accountants is that they don't ask too many questions, because many have bad social skills: many of them would never, on their own, be able to run a business or make deals or do the most important things involved in managing relations between large groups of people and making sure a product and/or service is delivered to happy customers and shareholders get paid off. Therefore, they don't constitute a threat to a business owner.
A student who studies English, on the other hand, is given skills specifically to critically engage with a text in such a way that they can ask these kinds of questions about why they are doing what they are doing, why they are talking to certain people and not others, why, even, they ought to study one thing or another, why one guy runs the show and they do all the work. None of this is very helpful if you want to be a good worker bee who meets all their deadlines and collects a pay check and goes home at the end of the day and never thinks about doing anything more with their life, but, if you want to have more in the world, you need to know how to question it.
I hate to use an example, but look at Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir. He has a PhD from the Institut für Sozialforschung, also known as the Frankfurt school, which is a research center whose members feature quite prominently on the syllabus of many English classes at the university level. Not exactly the same, but his education bears a remarkable resemblance at an advanced level to what many students with undergraduate degrees in English would have. But you wouldn't know that as an engineer; you would just be some employee, entirely replaceable.
Well that's the thing, there is a tiny market for your art historian or english Phd or whatever humanities specialty. And to get english professors you need english Phds and english students, who need an english professor. there is a need albeit a small one.
the universities also fairly say "choose your major we can't choose it for you"
so if too many people go for that english degree, at best you can make them aware the job market is tiny. But it is their choice to take their shot at their passion, a hypercompetitive field, not far different than being a hollywood actor.
the issue isn't any of that, that's all fine, the issue is why does it cost a gorillion dollars to get that english BA degree.
the spirit of it all is "pure learning is purely good, let us have you learn", and so we have english majors, that's all fine spirited, the issue is somewhere along the line someone at this so-called non-profit decided it costs 9999 gorillion dollars to reimburse the educator for this degree
There are many many universities and colleges and students/parents can make decisions about the curricula they choose, Which will in turn, over time, lead those schools to focus on what the market wants. Obviously you disagree about those choices but there you go.
Yeah, I did all that too. Why would English possibly be important? My job is to write code, all that matters is how well my programs work, whatever. Then I found out in the real world that I deal with other people and a lot of my job (and life!) is explaining and convincing people, not just writing good code. So, even though I went to school to be good at programming, I can see the value in people going to school to be good at communicating.
English is the global lingua franca. It’s how we interact with and transmit information, including ideas about accounting, engineering, etc.
It’s very fair to argue about the ROI of the average undergraduate English degree given the outrageous prices that universities are charging for them. But if you cannot see the tangible value in English language expertise, I don’t really know what to tell you.
I'm not sure an English degree vs. a history degree vs. a political science degree vs. just just working on the school newspaper is super useful. But certainly fluency and the ability to communicate is.
What the hell do LLMs have to do with anything on this topic? If anything, they commodify low-level tech folks just like past tools have. I'll mostly hire a smart liberal arts major so long as they're respectful of tech and other domain expertise over someone who thinks it's only about (probably narrow) technical smarts.
no one actually good at math is going to become a K-5 teacher, they’re gonna get paid, so it creates a doom loop where each new generation of primary school teachers get progressively shittier at math.
i have literally witnessed students in a senior level discrete math class struggle with simple algebraic operations. they were on the math education track.
Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building.
Instead, all I was told was to go to college.
So... the people that made me woefully sheep like and "financially innocent" then sent me to the wolves because they believed in me.
Seriously, they made huge changes to the way people were accepted into college - created High School "career counseling" (college/University recruiters) to tell everyone kid they were smart enough to go, and the dumber down tests convinced enough to convince the rest.
The loans went up each year - the costs more than doubled between my Freshman and Sophomore year and just never stopped going up - the more you owe the more you HAVE to finish to get the job to pay the loans.
Before all this, when less than 1% of all student loans had been defaulted on, the loan debt was made unforgivable by 6 people - a committee of bankers created by the people in Congress they bought.
It was setup so that of a millennial "Wins" it means they can afford to pay their loans - so the bank wins. If we lose we still have to pay/often must pay more with all the fees and added interest - bank still wins.
During the time I lived thru all this I was reading shit about how lazy all f are bc we don't own as many houses as we are supposed at our age - this is still true to this day actually.
This is an intolerable and disgusting thing for a society to do to an entire generation - any group is wrong but to plan out the demise of a generation of, at the time all this was first set in motion, we were literal Elementary Students.
These loans destroyed lives, relationships, sets parents against their children, divided families.
> Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building.
I kind of disagree with this. At least in my high school this was definitely taught, but at the time we were all dumb 14-17 year olds who didn’t care about any of that stuff we just wanted to know what is needed to get an A and then forget about it, and that was the good students!
A problem about teaching life stuff in schools is that I don’t think many of the teenagers in high school are in a place where they can absorb that stuff long enough for it to be relevant many years later.
I really don't understand the people who complain that they weren't taught about debt and loans and checking accounts. You were given a 6th grade math education, and you were taught how to read. High school classes cannot be expected to teach every possible circumstance or decision you'll find yourself in. At some point you have to self-start.
realistically, the complaint isn't about lack of things being taught at school (tho it's framed that way).
The real complaint is the lack of being told exactly what to do that leads to a path of automatic success. What they were told to do did not lead to automatic success, but is in fact, fraught with traps and dangers, most of which is avoidable but only for those with the foresight.
But i am a believer of personal responsibility, and that following the crowd (or common advice) without thinking critically about it will merely lead sheep to slaughter.
you can teach someone about financial concepts, without having the actual monies. These are not physical activities requiring actual mediums like driving or swimming. They are mental concepts - an extension of critical thinking and maths, with a bit of instruction following mixed in.
Good luck. In math, it's extremely difficult to teach the mental concepts and critical thinking. Unless you have a gifted teacher, most schools just teach you rote memorization and solving countless duplicate problems that use the same technique.
> Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building.
California became the 26th state a few months ago to require all students to take a personal finance course before graduating. About half the remaining states require students to take a combined personal finance/economics course (source: https://www.ngpf.org/blog/advocacy/how-many-states-require-s...).
It's a tough problem that reenforces itself. The high availability of loans allows colleges to charge exorbitant rates, and for most, the exorbitant tuition rates necessitate the use of loans, which allows the tuition rates to go even higher.
Fresh High School grads are a terrible demographic where good credit is concerned, there aren't many 18 year olds you could loan 6 figures to and expect to see that money again.
But now we're so deep in this rabbit hole that neither side has incentive to back down. Nothing shy of government intervention, or mass protest of the system, is likely to change it in my opinion.
> not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building.
Not everything can be, or is supposed to be, taught by schools. Your parents should've taught you those things, and if they didn't do that they failed you.
> Your parents should've taught you those things, and if they didn't do that they failed you.
Please be charitable. Your comment is unnecessarily mean. Unless you know the commenter personally, I don't think anyone can diagnose the commenter's upbringing from a single Internet comment.
I don't think they're referring to GP and his/her parents specifically. Until very, very recently, it was well accepted that there were a lot of things it your parents' responsibility to teach you. Expecting parents to teach their children things is not even remotely mean or unreasonable.
But objecting to schools teaching things in the event that parents don't is unreasonable because it punishes the child for their parents not living up to expectations. And on the particular topic of this thread, it punishes all of us because it's generally detrimental to society for people to take on massive un-serviceable debt due to a lack of financial education.
In a situation where the person's parents are hoping their child will be the first to be university educated with the hope that their education would help them break the cycle of poverty (i.e. they are not university educated themselves or that they don't have enough high school education to be able to teach their child about the pitfalls of taking an interest-bearing loan), what happens?
There's this famous saying that: "You cannot teach what you do not know".
> Your parents should've taught you those things, and if they didn't do that they failed you.
The problem of financially illiterate people doesn't go away when we find someone to blame for not teaching them. Parents "should" teach a lot of things they often don't, and one of the values of schools is that they plug some of those gaps to help produce better educated members of society. Whether or not schools are the right place to teach those things is irrelevant if the end goal is for people to actually have the right knowledge to be successful.
Plenty of parents do not know how to manage their finances any more than any other things that they do not know, which a school is supposed to be responsible for teaching. Financial literacy is one of the most important things that a person can learn. Society would surely benefit if classes were taught on the subject in high school.
Financial literacy for the average person consists of two things: do not buy things you don't really need / don't spend more than you have, and compound interest. I can't speak for anyone else but I did learn what compounding interest was in school.
I can't imagine a whole class being dedicated to these topics, but then people who only need to fill out a 1040 also complain they "weren't taught how to do taxes"; i.e., fill out a form with simple instructions provided.
At some point we have to recognize the bar is already pretty low. There is no wizardry involved in "financial literacy" unless you start getting into advanced investment / retirement topics. It just takes a very simple attitude shift. The problem is not that most people are too uneducated to figure out that a 40k/year job doesn't pay for a 100k degree: they learned that in elementary school. The problem is they never even think about it, and if they do, they don't care. I don't even mean this in a negative way: it's a lifestyle that would stress me right into the psych ward, but millions of Americans never worry themselves about how they're going to pay for something so long as they can keep the lights on and eat this month.
If they did care, they would go to cheaper schools to get the degrees; look how many of these degrees come from outrageously priced private schools when cheaper options are readily available. Look at how many people drive around 50-80k SUVs. Americans complain a lot about prices but they are not actually that price sensitive. They just assume they can do whatever they want and the system at large will just work everything out.
> Financial literacy for the average person consists of two things: do not buy things you don't really need / don't spend more than you have
Great, now take out a mortgage at a good time, predict interest rate and house prices manage your savings and plan your retirement, be self-employed for a year and correctly identify what is tax deductible and what isn’t, recognise when you are being sold a bad financial product.
There are all things a middle class person needs to deal with.
> Great, now take out a mortgage at a good time, predict interest rate and house prices
Nobody can do this. It’s not part of basic financial literacy. A few people who make careers out of investing or real estate attempt it and many of them fail.
If you are a normal person, you find a house that needs your basic needs in a decent area that you can afford and you buy it. You don’t try to throw darts at a board to figure out if the housing market is going to crash or the fed is going to lower rates. If you could reliably predict these things it’s your day job.
> manage your savings
Simply putting your savings into a savings account pr even under a mattress is more than most Americans do and is self-evident. Are there more optimal places? Maybe but if it matters to you you have the time to figure it out; Americans are doing well to accumulate 500 in emergency savings anywhere. Worrying about 5% interest money markets vs maybe an index fund for some portion is pointless at that level. (Ed - median emergency savings is 5k. This doesn’t require management.)
> plan your retirement
This becomes important as you approach retirement age, sure. Until then all you need to worry about is stuffing away as much money as you can because of that “compound interest” thing.
> self-employed for a year and correctly identify what is tax deductible and what isn’t
There’s a public website for the IRS where this is all laid about, but even Americans with easy
standard taxes pay an accountant because they don’t want to add a few numbers together and look at a tax table.
> recognise when you are being sold a bad financial product.
If you are worried about “financial products” and you’re not at retirement age, all you need to know is “it’s a scam” or you’re very rich.
> Not everything can be, or is supposed to be, taught by schools. Your parents should've taught you those things
Who is the genius that decided that you need a school and government neurotics to teach a kid to play basketball, but post gold-standard factional reserve banking is best taught by parents?
And who taught your parents, and their parents before? Do we go all the way back to cavemen for investment wisdom? You’ve got a bootstrap paradox.
Also in 1970’s we dropped the gold standard and the whole game has changed, did someone issue free adult education to being all the parents at the time up to speed?
The system is complete nonsense, you’ve got to be on copium.m to defend it.
If we taught money properly maybe voters would not elect fools and frauds to run things
What if I lost my parents before they got the chance to teach me that?
What if I was raised in a foster care and I never knew who my parents were?
And what if my parents don't know these things themselves?
There are many ways that this logic goes wrong. The school should teach that because it is very important lesson to engage in a society and be a good citizen.
Edit: Sorry I meant people raised in orphanages not foster care. I wasn't in focus enough while writing this. Sorry if this caused hard feelinga for anyone
This kind of argument might hold water if there were an epidemic of 12 year olds aimlessly drifting across the countryside with no adults taking care of them. But there's not, and you're not really making any point.
If you are assuming a guardianship role over a child, however temporary, you have a responsibility to teach them things, full stop.
I've known several foster parents over my life who would be outraged at the implicated that they are somehow lesser to the children they raised and are raising.
I think I mistyped what I mean. I meant people who were raised without parents in orphanages not foster care. Excuse my mistake and sorry if anyone felt anything negative from my comment.
And yet kids from foster families tend to have massively worse outcomes than others.
The US is obsessed with racial inequality, but from your life's perspective, it is better being black than being a foster kid, and no one bats an eye on the latter. Harvard won't certainly introduce any pseudoquotas on foster kids anytime soon.
I took out around $20k in loans to study literature starting in 2001. Graduated in 2005. Rent was $150 a month. Played a lot of poker and disc golf. Studied and learned a bit. Had a 75% scholarship to help with tuition. Had a $300/semester book stipend as part of that and just bought penny books off Amazon (one of the benefits of an English degree) and pocketed the difference.
Basically for 5-8% or so of my (estimated) lifetime I was completely free to goof around. Great value for someone who dislikes working.
Consolidated the loans after I graduated at 1.5% interest. Finished paying them off in 2021 with the Biden Bucks.
Pretty sure that kind of deal doesn’t exist anymore.
State school was hella cheap (it was back when Florida’s lotto money mostly went to scholarships for in-state students). I think full sticker price would’ve been around $2500/year for tuition+fees at the time?
I also started with enough credits to be nearly to (the equivalent of being in) junior year and took the bare minimum credits to keep the scholarship.
1. I took more in loans than I technically needed for school and spent it on living expenses like video games, gambling, fun stuff, etc.
2. I signed up for 4 classes a semester, often in things unrelated to my degree. Figured since I had 4 years of scholarship (and 4 years of loans available), I may as well just hang around and have fun.
3. By my math, (feel free to double check) 2021 minus 2005 is not 20. Loan payments didn’t start until after graduation. It was about $50 a month for minimum payments when I started paying and around $150 at the end. Don’t remember the exact way the payments increased over time. It was just steps, but not related to income.
Heh, I paid off all my student debt, about that much, with the starting bonus from my first job after school. America educations are basically free if you don't do some goofy shit like go into debt to study literature.
US is outrageously safe. People are just terrible at assessing actual risk vs. perceived risk. What specifically do you think is unsafe about the US?
Healthcare, yah that kinda sucks. We’ve got a really high ceiling and a really low floor. Other countries have a lower ceiling and a much higher floor. A significant problem in the US is that people don’t know how to navigate the health care system. That raises the floor quite a bit for the average person.
Lol no it was $150. This was Gainesville, Florida and I split a horrible studio apartment with a friend of mine.
It was located in a low lying area and once after a tropical storm we had to wade through hip-deep water to get to class (the apartment itself was miraculously high and dry). Coming home one night I saw a little gator swimming along near me as I trudged through it.
After we graduated my roommate moved to Manhattan for an engineering job. His month’s rent up there was significantly more than he paid for a year in college.
I ended up moving to Portland, Oregon in 2007 and my first rent here was $550. Now in 2024, I’ve finally tacked on that missing 0 and my rent is now around $1500.
1985-87 my partner and I rented a just fine spacious 1 bdrm with a 10 min walk to the Math building on the East side of Gville for $200/month. We both had graduate school stipends. The 4 apartments all had cool tenants. Geckos in the stairwell. It was glorious, even w/o AC.
I ended up finishing at ASU. This highly educated ChE/Math imbecile took out a $12K student loan near the end because it was "free"[1]. Got to silicon valley and started learning the maths about house loans and income tax interactions and took a glance at the student loan interest payments (something like 6%? I don't remember) and freaked out. Paid it down immediately. Needless to say we advised the daughter different.
[1] The application was like: name, address, and school. Less than a page.
I remember rent was $1800 per semester for my friends, and they split that 3 ways. So about $600 for 4 months, or $150/month. To be fair, it was a bit of a dump. But that's less you have to worry about when having parties. I had a slightly nicer single room and closer to campus with parking and it was $1200 per semester, or $300 month. This was slightly over a decade ago. I was curious and did a quick check - seems the single rooms are about $600/mo and I saw a 3 bed for $800/mo. Still really cheap considering all the inflation that happened over the past decade.
Big state U is in the middle of nowhere, and in those years I was paying closer to $250, but I could see if you were willing to compromise on quality or quantity of personal space, getting that down to $150 without even hitting bottom.
My apartment shared with three other roommates in that era was $750 (four bedrooms and a giant living room in a trendy neighborhood of a decent sized city). So $150 checks out.
I went to college before I had internet access and my decision on what college degree to get and where to go to get it was based upon the salary I would receive upon graduation and my ability to repay my loans. I went to the library to figure these things out for myself.
Nowadays, you don't even have to get up out of your chair. If you are a young person and you make stupid decisions on your college education and student loans, that's a YOU thing.
I personally think college should be free because education is a worthwhile endeavor for everyone. But since it isn't, I'm not willing to make excuses for those who attend without weighing the costs and benefits. It's one of the easiest things in the world to do.
Then colleges are concerned when they see enrollment at many majors keep shrinking, while the demand for computer science grows, even when the college doesn't even have a proper CompSci department, but they depend on the Math school.
Then the students wonder why it's a 4 year degree with a full year wroth of non-major classes that seem unrelated, but tack on tens of thousands to the cost of the degree, plus whatever on-campus housing and meal plan, mandatory for freshmen, might cost.
There are only two options with debt: bad debt are written off, lender takes a hit and the lender must be careful who they lend money to.
Or bad debt lingers forever and accrues lucrative interest, in which case giving out bad debt is the whole point for the lender’s operation. The only risk is that the debtor might die. If the debt also passes to the next of kin, you have full-on, real slavery.
> The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged.
I mean it's a pretty simple concept that you borrow money and you must pay it back.
However we agree that the failure is that we do not educate them enough already in the first 12 years we force upon them. For that I blame a lack of options, government "standards" which become ceilings instead of floors, and the unions that protect bad teachers, also I'll note as a foreigner in the US. The US Schools i've seen (and i'm extrapolating here to most public schools) are ran like social clubs and have far too much time devoted to bs that does not help the kids. I'm talking about extracurriculars that impede with a quality education. Football is not a subject we should be prioritizing as a nation... Formals, homecoming, spirit days etc are such a distraction from what highschool kids should be focused on -- Growing up and making a viable future for themselves.
People note that Highschool rankings in Canada are excellent, well guess what? None of that happens in Canadian highschools (that I'm aware of), there might be a school dance or two, and "Prom" is very low key, relatively. High school football is small time...
I am disinclined to agree with you. Homecoming, football, having fun in sports, are exactly what kids should be focused on. They should be enjoying life, not hunched over materials studying late into the night.
Of course, focus on footballs, elaborate dance, and other sports can be excessive. I merely object to the excessive focus on academics, the rat race, and pressure cooker environment to get education at top ranked colleges.
On the contrary education should be meeting the needs of the 21st century, teaching skills to create functioning adults that can navigate life's challenge, such as avoiding scammers, how to judge quality information, how to diagnose and solve emotional challenges. There will still be classes taught on academics such as learning to read, simple arithmetic.
Only when they're adults that their focus will entirely be on academics. Academics are easy if you're well adjusted and know how to learn.
where are the parent's? They're meant to be the ones teaching these non-academic education to their children.
School does not replace parenting. School is for academic studies - stuff that a parent won't have had the qualifications to teach.
This is rigid thinking. We should be adapting schools to the need of the 21st century and challenges our current population faces, rather than have people sink or swim.
Leaving it to parenting alone is basically sink or swim. Some do great. Some do shit. Some are middling. Never mind the fact that a large part of children time are spent in school. Schools are basically daycare. They're also 'raising' children whether we want to admit it or not.
That's pretty much the hard part. There will still be some needs for some academics classes. However, once you teach them how to learn, learning academics is easy to do.
It's unclear to me which country you mean you'd rather live in.
But for me, I actually do prefer to live in the US. But it's a fallacy to think there aren't ways the best could be improved. IMO the US could stand to do a little bit of growing up, and get rid of this "life is a club/party, and partying is the meaning of life" mentality that I see is so the root of many different kinds of behaviors (that are not partying in and of themselves)
i agree, but the life is a club/party mentality isn’t what’s plaguing education, it’s the waste of time trying to get the bottom 10% of kids to perform at the median level. when i was in school, those kids got sent to alternative school so the rest of us could actually learn.
furthermore, i think not enough attention is being paid to the top 10% of students, most of whom are ignored as the teacher tries to wrangle a few shitheads poisoning the well of the classroom so to speak.
i think teachers should be paid roughly 5x their current median wage while simultaneously making it as difficult to become a teacher as a doctor , lawyer, or any other prestigious licensed position
> The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged.
I guarantee you that law/med school students have an education in "complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged."
Because before the current law was passed, they were the ones abusing the old "complex debt instruments" to discharge debt they knew they'd be able to pay back once they started making bank. The law was passed because they were doing this in large numbers. For these serious med/law students, the old system was free money. The new system is a reasonable risk.
Did you know this? If so, why did you write "by definition?" And why go off on a tangent about English literature students?
“ guarantee you that law/med school students have an education in "complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged."”
All the people here claiming they know a good degree from a bad one as if they have divine providence of what will happen in 5 years
And I gave them a $100,000 and ask them you to buy and hold a single non-FAANG or meme stock for the duration of their degree you would probably loose money. Or to predict if you should hold shares vs bonds for 5 years, without adjusting their position, like you do with a degree.
You could start a degree as a VFC artist and in 5 years your job might disappear with AI.
You flew too close to the sun. You can’t argue with a bunch of people who are in debt and learned that playing the victim pays.
It’s funny. That everybody is mad at the banks and schools. But the politicians and do good laws passed are what caused all of this.
Banks did it want to give loans out for shitty degrees to people who would probably not pay them back. So laws were passed to force banks they had to give out loans.
Schools did not want to accept everybody, but only the top of class. But laws were passed forcing them to widen their acceptance criteria.
This creates the perfect storm we are in.
Before the system was self limiting. Banks only gave out loans for degrees and to people who had high probability to pay back. Schools accepted only the best students who had a high probability of succeeding.
The loans were low risk, high reward, and the schools were able to provide a higher level of overall education to those who did go.
No they did not. They threatened to simply stop offering loans for school. The only way to get them back on board was to make the loans they issue for school was to make it so such loans could survive bankruptcy.
Many banks were fine not offering loans if it meant they could not decline offering loans for specific degrees, schools or even based on the applicants grades.
Taking our a vast loan to study English literature might seem unwise, but it’s something I could definitely see a starry eyed 17 year old deciding to do.